Panels of the American quilt

An important memory of President Obama's second inauguration Monday is the way black American culture permeated, in an entirely unobtrusive way, the entire day of formalities and festivities.

It certainly wasn't just the presence of Beyonce - though the pop icon and her singing of the national anthem were hard to ignore at Monday's inauguration of President Barack Obama for a second term.

It wasn't just the line from poet Richard Blanco's inaugural poem - "We have a dream we all keep dreaming" - echoing, from a Cuban American's perspective, another grand moment in the rhetorical history of Washington, D.C., when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic "I have a dream" address in the middle of the civil rights movement.

And it wasn't even just the president's line from his own speech from the Capitol steps, one of the only overt references to racial issues in the address: "Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together."

No, the fact that the citizens of the United States of America have elected and, perhaps more interesting, re-elected an African-American president was reflected Monday not only in all of those incidental details. That is because - finally, dynamically, and even inevitably - black American culture is American culture, one of the many that weave together to make the rich fabric of the American story. There is no longer and never will be any way of separating that thread from the mainstream through which it now flows.

Though Inauguration Day is technically Jan. 20, and though the president was sworn in Sunday in a private White House ceremony, the public inauguration was held - by chance, though a fortuitous one - on the national holiday that celebrates King.

That ceremony featured an invocation by Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of another slain civil rights leader, and she said: "One hundred fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years after the March on Washington, we celebrate the spirit of our ancestors, which has allowed us to move from a nation of unborn hopes and a history of disenfranchised to today's expression of a more perfect union."

While for many Americans the second inaugural of this president - or of any president - is anti-climactic in the extreme, simply because we have been there and done that, as the news cameras panned the still-large crowds who flocked to the National Mall Monday, the emotion in the black faces seen there was palpable.

One 70-something visitor from Georgia said that he had driven all the way up for the occasion for one reason alone: He felt he was unlikely to see another black president inaugurated in his lifetime. But another said she had come from Chicago for the second inaugural precisely because of its normalcy, unlike the first, more festive and ground-breaking occasion four years ago.

And that normalcy is indeed what was momentous about Monday's symbolic events. We live in a nation that can, perhaps as some kind of novelty, elect a president of African descent whose wife and daughters are descended not only from Africans but also from American slaves.

We live in a country in which race, while a fact of life, is at last not the be-all and end-all of an American's life. It is part of her or him, and he or she can be proud of that ancestry and of that culture's contribution to the national fabric. And from there we move on into our personal and communal lives, all of us panels in the American quilt.